“See if you can't get volunteers from this crowd,” suggested Thorpe. “I can let you have two men to show you trails. If you can make it that way, it will help me out. I need as many of the crew as possible to use this flood water.”
“Oh, Harry,” cried Carpenter, shocked. “You can't be going to work again to-day after that horrible sight, before we have made the slightest effort to recover the bodies!”
“If the bodies can be recovered, they shall be,” replied Thorpe quietly. “But the drive will not wait. We have no dams to depend on now, you must remember, and we shall have to get out on freshet water.”
“Your men won't work. I'd refuse just as they will!” cried Carpenter, his sensibilities still suffering.
Thorpe smiled proudly. “You do not know them. They are mine. I hold them in the hollow of my hand!”
“By Jove!” cried the journalist in sudden enthusiasm. “By Jove! that is magnificent!”
The men of the river crew had crouched on their narrow footholds while the jam went out. Each had clung to his peavey, as is the habit of rivermen. Down the current past their feet swept the debris of flood. Soon logs began to swirl by,—at first few, then many from the remaining rollways which the river had automatically broken. In a little time the eddy caught up some of these logs, and immediately the inception of another jam threatened. The rivermen, without hesitation, as calmly as though catastrophe had not thrown the weight of its moral terror against their stoicism, sprang, peavey in hand, to the insistent work.
“By Jove!” said the journalist again. “That is magnificent! They are working over the spot where their comrades died!”
Thorpe's face lit with gratification. He turned to the young man.
“You see,” he said in proud simplicity.